Director: Higuchinsky
Writers: Junji Ito, Kengo Kaji
Starring: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki
1 Hour, 30 Minutes, Japanese, English Subtitled
Synopsis
We see a dead body in the middle of a spiral.
Credits roll.
A girl, Kirie, is late for school. She runs through the streets. A boy jumps out and scares her, he says he likes scaring people. He also likes Kirie. She also runs into a strange man photographing a large snail, but he seems frozen. She catches up with Shuichi, her ride to town. It was his father filming the snail. Shuichi wants to run away with Kirie. Something is bothering him.
Kirie’s father recently won a prize for his pottery. It’s the “art of the vortex.” He shows the pot he’s spinning and says he always feels dizzy watching it. As he looks down on the pot, it makes a visual spiral. “There’s something mysterious in the vortex. It is the highest form of art.”
The next morning at school, Kirie is talking with a friend when the boy jumps out in front of her again. They call him an idiot and move on. A moment later, another boy falls through the open circular area of the huge spiral staircase. This is the image we saw before the credits rolled. Was he doing stunts on the staircase?
A rival girl encounters them and says she likes to draw other’s attention. She’s not a major character, but throughout the film, her hair takes on more and more of an outrageous spiraled design.
After school, Shuichi explains about “the uzumaki,” or spiral. He thinks the town is cursed by spirals. Shuichi explains that his father is obsessing over spiral things, sitting there all day staring at springs and things. We see his father stir the soup, and yeah, he’s losing his mind. Shuichi brings Kirie home, and the father is beating the mother for throwing out his “collection” of spirals. His eyes go crazy, spiraling around in opposite directions.
One kid comes to school covered in slime. Something in his back is pulsing. Kirie calls Shuichi on the phone, but he’s not home. His father is messing around with the washing machine. Kirie’s father has complete the spiral dish for Shuichi’s father and asks her to take it over to their house. She goes inside and finds Shuichi’s father inside the washing machine, stretched into a spiral by the spinning machine.
At the funeral, his mother screams. She sees his father in the sky but it’s really a huge spiral cloud formation. She passes out, and they head to the hospital. The spiral cloud touches down in the local pond. Again, Shuichi says the town is cursed. A reporter stops by, and he has heard a few things and wants to understand what’s really going on. They watch a video the father made before he died.
Kirie’s father, the sculptor, is covered in mud. He went digging for clay at Dragonfly Pond, where the cloud touched down. Shuichi’s mother, in the hospital, cuts off her fingertips to remove the spiral fingerprints. We see another student with a thing growing on his back.
The reporter finds information about ancient mirrors found at the bottom of that pond, and that mirrors, snakes, and cults are somehow involved. He calls Shuichi and wants to meet at the pond right away. Jump-out-and-scare-you boy jumps out in front of the reporter’s car, gets tangled up in the wheel and dies. The reporter’s head hits the windshield, creating another spiral pattern.
A huge millipede crawls inside Shuichi’s mother’s ear and tells her it wants to live inside her. She stabs herself in the ear. Later, Shuichi and Kirie see her face, screaming, in the spiral funnel clouds. A typhoon is coming— a HUGE spiral! There are now reports of half-human-half-snail things that used to be human. They’ve all left town for some reason.
Shuichi and Kirie go to find her father so they can leave town, but Shuichi’s legs start fusing together and twisting around. He’s becoming a spiral now. He attacks her. We then see stills of other townspeople dead from spirals.
Commentary
Well, it was weird, that’s for sure. There are spirals hidden through the scenes in various images. Nothing is really explained, and no cause is given for any of this. Were the snails intelligent? Some kind of alien takeover? Was this magical? It seemed like a curse? Who was behind it? We don’t know any of this, but it was fun to watch.